Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

This is where it gets Orwellian. Here was one of the MoD's last-minute demands:

All blacked out text must be removed and the relevant sentences rewritten without the obscured wording.

These were blacked-out redactions agreed over the course of a four-month review process. The redactions involved the MoD saying that certain words were breaches of operational security and could therefore endanger the lives of British troops.

Where they made a legitimate case (and on this I erred very much on the side of caution), it was agreed that certain words and short passages would be blacked out.

This is a common practice in books published the United States. It means that it is clear exactly where material has been removed and it avoids tortuous negotiations over re-wording (six-month review process anyone?), which can often lead to awkward circumlocutions and euphemisms.

Some of the agreed redactions that the MoD sought to remove

But at the eleventh hour (after the books had been printed and the day before they were due to go on sale), however, the MoD decided (along with numerous other objections) that it didn't like blacked-out redactions after all.

So we were faced with a demand that a debate take place over how to insert words to replace dozens of blacked out passages that had taken months to agree. To engage in this would have delayed publication indefinitely.

That's right: part of what the MoD wanted to do was – throughout the text – to insert words in places where it had already been agreed that they would be removed.

We rejected this blanket demand and blacked-out redactions appear in the book.

Readers can judge for themselves whether what the MoD sought to do was legitimate.